Fortress programming language - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

designed for high-performance computing. It was created by Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

with funding from DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems

High Productivity Computing Systems

High Productivity Computing Systems is a DARPA project for developing a new generation of economically viable high productivity computing systems for national security and industry in the 2002-2010 timeframe....

project. One of the language designers is Guy L. Steele Jr., whose previous work includes Scheme, Common Lisp

Common Lisp

Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...

, and Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

Language features

The name "Fortress" is intended to connote a secure Fortran, i.e., "a language for high-performance computation that provides abstraction and type safety on par with modern programming language principles". Its improvements include implicit parallelism, Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

support and concrete syntax

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

that is similar to mathematical notation

Mathematical notation

Mathematical notation is a system of symbolic representations of mathematical objects and ideas. Mathematical notations are used in mathematics, the physical sciences, engineering, and economics...

. The language is not designed to be similar to Fortran. Syntactically, it most resembles Scala, Standard ML

Standard ML

Standard ML is a general-purpose, modular, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference. It is popular among compiler writers and programming language researchers, as well as in the development of theorem provers.SML is a modern descendant of the ML...

, and Haskell

Haskell (programming language)

Haskell is a standardized, general-purpose purely functional programming language, with non-strict semantics and strong static typing. It is named after logician Haskell Curry. In Haskell, "a function is a first-class citizen" of the programming language. As a functional programming language, the...

. Fortress is being designed from the outset to have multiple syntactic stylesheets. Source code can be rendered as ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

text, in Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

, or as a prettied image. This will allow for support of mathematical symbols and other symbols in the rendered output for easier reading.

Fortress is also designed to be both highly parallel and have rich functionality contained within libraries, drawing from Java but taken to a higher degree. For example, the 'for' loop is a parallel operation, which will not always iterate in a strictly linear manner depending on the underlying software and hardware. However, the 'for' loop is a library function and can be replaced by another 'for' loop of the programmer's liking rather than being built into the language.

History

Fortress was one of three languages created with funding from the High Productivity Computing Systems

High Productivity Computing Systems

project. (The others are X10

X10 (programming language)

X10 is a programming language being developed by IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center as part of the Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System project funded by DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program...

from IBM and Chapel from Cray, Inc

Cray

Cray Inc. is an American supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray went on to form the spin-off Cray Computer Corporation , in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995,...

.) Sun was dropped from the HPCS project in November 2006, leading to uncertainty about the future of Fortress.

In January 2007, Fortress was transformed into "an open-source project with an open-source community. People outside Sun are now writing Fortress code and testing it using the open-source Fortress interpreter."
Version 1.0 of the Fortress Language Specification was released in April 2008, along with a compliant implementation targeting the Java Virtual Machine

Java Virtual Machine

A Java virtual machine is a virtual machine capable of executing Java bytecode. It is the code execution component of the Java software platform. Sun Microsystems stated that there are over 4.5 billion JVM-enabled devices.-Overview:...

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Language features

History

See also

External links